“Don’t remind me of that dungeon,” Ian said, “lest I say things no one will want to hear.” He patted her on the shoulder. “He’s canny, that lad of yours, or so I hear. Pat didn’t slice him to ribbons and Jamie left him still breathing. That bodes well. I’ll make some hearty porritch and we’ll decide on our options.”
She watched him go, then looked at Patrick. She glanced behind her to find Jamie standing by his fire with his back to them.
“Is he worried?” she asked.
“Shaking off the terror of a woman almost strangling him, rather,” Patrick said with a smile. “Actually, I imagine he’s thinking. ’Tis a very great effort for him, so we’d best leave him to it.”
She swallowed, hard. “Will Nathaniel die?”
“Can you pick a medieval lock?”
“That, I don’t know.”
“We’d best find out then, hadn’t we?” He paused, then looked at her seriously. “Could you kill a man if it meant Nathaniel’s life in trade?”
She shivered. “I don’t know that, either.”
“We’ll start there.” He paused. “I don’t know what you’ll need to go through to get to him, but if you can free him, he can do what needs to be done. He’s more dangerous than he looks in those pricey suits he wears. But you’ll have to work fast. You’ve been in our dungeon here and know what it does to you.”
“Is that Fergusson dungeon worse?”
“Much.”
She followed him into Jamie’s very modern kitchen, which should have seemed incongruous. Somehow, given everything she’d seen over the past few days, it wasn’t nearly as weird as it should have been.
She ate, because she had to. She gave Patrick an unflinching list of her less savory skills, because he needed to know where her weaknesses were so he could remedy them. She apologized to Jamie and had a most abject and lairdly apology in return and a cementing of eternal friendship on her way out the door to see what Patrick could make of her before they burned through all their daylight.
She didn’t like to think about the fact that Nathaniel probably couldn’t even see any daylight.
She supposed she would eventually figure out exactly where he’d gone and just what he thought he was going to do once he got there.
Change history? Let her walk past him?
She could hardly bear the thought, so she put that thought behind her and went to work.
Chapter 28
Therewere certain events in a man’s life that caused him serious reflection. Birth. Death. Threats from enemy clansmen.
Rats nesting in his hair.
Nathaniel considered his situation and wondered just how in the hell he’d managed to get himself where he was at present.
He hadn’t meant to find himself in the Fergussons’ dungeon. He supposed, looking back on it now, that he was damned fortunate he was alive to enjoy his luxurious accommodations. If that was an improvement over taking a chance with death whilst roaming free through rugged forests and beautiful meadows, he wasn’t sure how.
The truth was, given where he was, he just wasn’t sure how long his life would be. The decaying corpse sitting against the wall across from him might have had an opinion if he’d had the ability to spew out any details.
Nathaniel leaned his head back against the wall, reminded himself that he’d been in his current locale for only a handful of days, then decided to distract himself by bringing to mind how he’d come to be where he was. With any luck, examining those details might lead him to a solution he might not see otherwise.
He had, however many days ago it had been, refused to wait for time to call him and instead had forced the time gate to do his bidding. Jamie had advised him that such a thing was possible, if not perhaps a less-than-desirable thing to succeedat. Nathaniel had felt he hadn’t had a choice, so when the gate had opened, he’d plunged ahead, knowing that he had to do what was necessary regardless of his personal feelings on the matter.
Leaving Emma sleeping on her couch had been the single hardest thing he’d ever had to do.
He turned away from that thought and concentrated on retracing his steps. He had been accustomed to walking into battle; he hadn’t been accustomed to interrupting the laird of the clan Fergusson stirring himself to do a little scouting to see if his men were reporting things accurately.
He’d been welcomed with open arms by a handful of men he had definitely been less than pleasant to in the past, then escorted with all due haste and diligence to their keep. He’d seen that keep before, of course, in both the past and the future, and he could say without hesitation that the place was disgusting no matter in which century it found itself.
He would admit, grudgingly, that whilst the Fergussons never had much imagination on the battlefield, they made up for it in their dungeon. His dagger had been taken from him, of course, but now it sat five paces away, jammed artistically into the floor. Too far for him to reach but just far enough away to give him a clear view of it.
